THE LEASE REGISTER · COMMERCIAL LEASE PORTFOLIOS · MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA-WIDE Your leases are full of clocks. They run whether or not anyone is watching.
Every lease in the estate, read into one register where each field, date and dollar carries its document, its page and its clause. It arrives with a calendar of every notice window and a sheet of the money at risk. The fee is fixed by estate size and guaranteed twice: refunded in full if delivery misses the published clock, and refunded in full if the Exposure Sheet identifies less than twice the fee.
One scoping call. A written scope and a fixed fee follow within two working days.
★ 5.0 · VERIFIED CLIENT REVIEW ON CLUTCH| Field | Value | Confidence | Citation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Option to renew | Notice 12 to 6 months before expiry | VERIFIED | p14 · cl 12.2(a) |
| Rent review · 1 Jul 2027 | CPI, no ratchet | VERIFIED | p9 · cl 8.4 |
| Make-good | Silent | SILENT | p22 · cl 19 |
The position a multi-site estate is usually in.
None of it is misconduct. It is what happens when an estate grows one site at a time and the record of it grows one row at a time.
The lease is the contract. What the organisation works from is a lease schedule, a property spreadsheet and the AASB 16 register the auditors ask for: three summaries of the same documents, built at different times, by different people, for different readers.
Between the lease and any of them sits a set of dated obligations. Unless someone reads the lease itself, each one is taken on trust.
The three summaries do not always agree with each other. When they do not, there is no way to tell which one is wrong without opening the lease.
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The auditor's request.
AASB 16 requires a right-of-use asset and a lease liability for most leases. Measuring them takes the lease term, including any option period the entity is reasonably certain to exercise, the payments, and a discount rate. Every one of those inputs is read out of a lease document. When the audit asks where a figure came from, the answer has to be a clause.
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The window that closed.
An option to renew has a window. It opens and closes on dates set by the lease, often many months before expiry. The list of those dates usually lives somewhere other than in the leases.
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The review nobody initiated.
A market review has to be triggered by a date. If the date passes without a notice, the review is forgone for the period. A schedule will not report a review that was available and not taken.
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The person who knows.
Ask where a figure came from and the answer is often a name rather than a clause. That is not a criticism of the person. It is a filing system that holds one copy, and the copy can resign.
An answer you cannot check is an answer you cannot rely on.
One engagement. Four artifacts. One standard.
Every claim in every artifact is traceable to a source document, a page and a clause.
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01
The Scope Sheet.
What is in, what is out, the access model, the counting rules for the guarantee, and who commissioned it. Signed before anything is read.
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02
The Register.
Every lease, every field, every citation. Fourteen field groups, from parties and premises through options, reviews, outgoings, incentives and make-good to guarantees and special conditions. Each field carries its value, its confidence and its clause. Exportable, in a format your own people can open. It is yours and it keeps working after we leave.
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03
The Calendar.
Every notice window, review date and expiry across the estate, dated and cited to clause, so no option lapses unexamined.
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04
The Exposure Sheet.
The money at risk and the money recoverable, line by line. Each line carries its dollar figure, its clause and the action that realises it.
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05
The Register Session.
Ninety minutes. The estate walked live, with the evidence open.
Where the lease is silent. A silent field is a finding, not a gap in the work. Where the lease does not deal with a matter, the Register records silent and cites the clause where the term would ordinarily have appeared. Silence in a lease is frequently the most expensive thing in it. A blank cell hides the same fact as a guess.
Option to renew. Written notice no earlier than twelve and no later than six months before the term ends.
14 Watt Street, Lease.pdf
page 14 · clause 12.2(a) · verified
30 December 2026. Notice window closes, 14 Watt Street.
Derived from the term end, 30 June 2027.
page 14 · clause 12.2(a)
Make-good: silent. The lease sets no reinstatement standard.
14 Watt Street, Lease.pdf
page 22 · clause 19, where the term would ordinarily appear
See Sourcetrace, the engine the read runs on
Working days from access. Four and a half hours of yours on a small estate.
The clock starts at access, not at signature.
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Days 1 to 2
Scope signed, access granted, read-only. The document set is assembled and reconciled against the site list, so what is missing is known before the read rather than discovered during it.
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The read
Every lease read through Sourcetrace. Structure preserved at ingestion. Every extracted field cited to document, page and clause.
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Verification
Named human review points. Every field is checked against the clause it cites, and anything that cannot be verified is marked uncertain rather than smoothed.
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The last two days
The Register Session is held. The final Register, Calendar and Exposure Sheet follow within two working days of the session.
Your team's whole part, published: one 60-minute intake, two hours of property or finance time assembling the document set and granting access on an estate up to 100 leases and up to five hours at 350, and one 90-minute session. Nothing else is asked of your calendar.
The terms, plainly.
The fee is fixed by estate size and is set out below. It is invoiced at commissioning and paid before the read begins. The clock starts at access.
Delivered within the published working days for the band, or the fee is refunded in full. Delivered means the artifacts exist to the published templates and the session has been held or offered. It does not mean the reader agrees with them.
If the Exposure Sheet identifies less than twice the fee in dated exposure, recoverable amounts and unprovisioned obligations, the fee is refunded in full. A line counts when it carries a dollar figure, its clause citation and the action that realises it.
This floor applies to an estate that meets all three conditions: at least 60 leases; at least three options, rent reviews or expiries falling inside eighteen months; and outgoings reconciliation statements for the last two financial years available to be read. Where any one of them is not met, the delivery guarantee stands and the floor does not.
The conditions are on the page because the counting rules below are conservative and depend on evidence existing. A floor that is offered where the evidence to satisfy it cannot be reached is not a guarantee. It is a lottery ticket with the firm's name on it.
Dollars realisable now: outgoings recovered beyond what the lease permits, rent applied on a mechanism the lease does not provide for, incentives not drawn down, security held past its release condition. Counted at the amount the lease supports, from the reconciliation statements and invoices supplied. Not at the amount a negotiation might produce.
Forward-dated avoidable spend inside twelve months: a review about to apply on the wrong mechanism, an outgoings estimate about to be struck on a basis the lease does not permit, a ratchet about to hold a rent above the mechanism's own result.
The cost of a dated obligation passing unexamined, counted conservatively, from documented comparables. An option lapsing is counted at the lower of your own most recent fitout and relocation cost for a comparable site, and twelve months of the difference between the option rent and the holdover rent the lease provides for. Make-good at the lower of your own most recent settlement on a comparable site and a written estimate you already hold. A review not initiated at the difference the lease's own mechanism would have produced. Outgoings at the amount the lease does not permit to be recovered.
Unpriced lines. Where none of those bases can be applied because no comparable and no estimate exists, the line is recorded in the Exposure Sheet, marked unpriced, and does not count toward the floor. A guarantee that counts a number nobody can source is not a guarantee.
Refunds under either guarantee are paid within five business days, without negotiation.
The organisation ends the engagement holding either a position on its estate it can defend line by line, or its fee back. Those are the two outcomes on offer.
Independence, in writing.
We never take referral fees, commissions or margins from lease administration platforms, agents, valuers, landlords or make-good contractors. We never promise a recovery before the leases are read. And we never sell the fix inside the Register: every action line is written so any competent adviser, agent or lawyer can execute it, including one that is not us. The finding cannot be inflated to earn us the next job, because the next job is not for sale here.
The Register reports what the document states and where it states it. Questions of enforceability, interpretation, tax treatment and accounting treatment remain with the appropriate adviser. We establish what the supplied evidence supports.
Built so your people can be straight with us.
The Register records fields and citations. No artifact names anyone below the signatory, and that sentence appears in the Scope Sheet.
The person who kept the spreadsheet is the Register's first reader, not its subject. In practice they are the most useful person in the engagement, because they already know which leases are the difficult ones and where the amendments are filed.
Where the Register and the existing schedule disagree, the Register says what the lease says and cites the clause. It does not accuse anyone. It shows what is currently unverified.
The read is documentary first. Questions confirm rather than discover, and they go to one named contact.
Traceability is the product standard, not a feature.
- Traceable
Every output cites its source document and page. No orphan facts.
- Private
Your environment or private Australian hosting where selected. No training on your data.
- Reviewed
Named human review points before any output is relied on.
- Audited
A log of what the system read, produced and flagged.
- Honest
Uncertain answers are marked uncertain. Confidence is reported, not performed.
Bands, after the work is named.
| Estate | Fee | Founding fee | Clock |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 100 leases | A$14,500 | A$11,500 | 15 working days |
| 101 to 200 leases | A$22,500 | A$18,000 | 25 working days |
| 201 to 350 leases | A$34,500 | A$27,500 | 40 working days |
| Above 350 leases | Quoted after scoping | Not offered | Set in the scope |
An estate within ten leases of a band boundary is scoped to the lower band. The rule is on the page so that nobody has to argue for it.
Why the bands stop at 350. The reason is capacity, not pricing. Above 350 leases a Register needs a second reviewer working concurrently to hold the clock, and the firm currently runs one. Quoting after scoping is how that is handled honestly. When a second reviewer is in place and has delivered inside a clock, the next band is published here with its fee and its own working days.
The founding fee. The first three Registers are commissioned at the founding fee shown above, roughly twenty per cent below the band fee. The reason is published rather than negotiated: the first three engagements are where the clock and the verification model are calibrated, and the organisation that goes first carries that. Nothing is asked in exchange. No case record, no reference call and no logo is a condition of the founding fee.
The fee is on this page because you should not have to book a call to learn it. It sits here, after the work it buys, because a number without its contents is only an invitation to compare invoices.
Capacity, stated plainly.
One Register is in delivery at a time. A Register and a Verdict may run together. Two Registers may not.
The read is verified by a named reviewer against the clause each field cites. The principal reads every exception, presents them at the session, and signs every Register personally.
The name on the Register.
Lumen & Lever is led by Lee Powell: Oxford-trained software engineer, roughly thirty years across enterprise architecture and production delivery in banking, insurance, exchange, healthcare and government. He built IBM's first online retail platform and document software used by more than a million writers worldwide. The same discipline that ran a hundred-million-dollar post-acquisition banking integration now reads estates and signs Registers on them.
The relevant pedigree here is the document one. Sourcetrace’s public lineage is rtfstruct, an open source parser that reads a document as a structured tree rather than as flat text, published under Apache-2.0 with an archived release and a DOI. It exists because most pipelines discard structure at ingestion: tables become paragraphs, clause numbers detach from clauses, and the chain back to the page disappears before anyone asks for it.
A Register is that argument applied to an estate. A firm that has spent thirty years on the layer beneath the answer is the firm to ask where the answer came from.
Founder experience, not a client list: Lloyds International · Commonwealth Bank of Australia · Deutsche Bank · ASX · IBM · Zurich Insurance · GlaxoSmithKline · ASIC · Australian Government Defence · NSW Health · Westpac. These are organisations and sectors from Lee Powell's prior career unless separately named in a Lumen & Lever case record. Confirmed Lumen & Lever outcomes are published separately only when permission exists.
A client, on the record.
"Lumen and Lever ensured that we could make informed decisions about AI. I would highly recommend them"Verified · Clutch 5.0
"They had an exceptional way of communicating extremely technical topics in a simplified and relatable way."
The same instrument, two other uses.
Buying an estate rather than examining your own.
Due Diligence is a Register pointed at a target's leases. Before the price is agreed on a portfolio whose value sits in its agreements, establish what the documents actually support: which records reconcile, which do not, and which have no source document at all. Fixed scope, fixed fee, no success fee and no incentive for the deal to complete.
Keeping the Register live.
Every new lease, variation, renewal and surrender read into the Register within a stated number of working days. The Calendar chased, with a named person notified inside each window, and an annual re-read of the whole estate. It informs, it does not act: notices and elections remain yours. Available only to estates that have completed a Register, because a live Register needs a verified baseline. Terms on request.
Asked before commissioning.
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What does a Lease Register cost?
A$14,500 plus GST up to 100 leases, A$22,500 to 200, A$34,500 to 350, quoted above that. Fixed, invoiced at commissioning. No retainer and no hourly billing. Guaranteed twice: refunded in full if delivery misses the published clock, and refunded in full if the Exposure Sheet identifies less than twice the fee.
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Why is the fee paid up front?
Because the Register must owe nothing to anyone once the read begins. A firm chasing its own invoice at delivery has an interest in the reader's mood. Paid at commissioning and guaranteed twice, the Register answers only to the leases.
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Our property manager already does this.
The property manager administers the estate day to day, which is a different job from establishing what the documents say and citing it. Independence is part of the product here, and it is in writing above. The Register is also designed to be useful to the property manager: a cited baseline is easier to administer than an uncited one.
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We have a lease system.
A lease system holds what somebody typed into it. The Register holds what the lease says, with the clause attached. Where the two agree, the system is confirmed and the audit evidence now exists. Where they disagree, you find out before an auditor or a landlord does. Many organisations commission a Register precisely to load a system they already own.
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Our data cannot leave the building.
Your environment or private Australian hosting. Read-only access. No training on your data. The access model is signed before anything is read.
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What if the estate turns out to be clean?
Then the Register says so, with the clause behind every field, and the organisation holds audit evidence it did not have before. The value floor covers the case where the Exposure Sheet finds less than twice the fee.
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Our auditors have never raised a problem with our lease numbers.
That is a statement about what was asked, not about what the leases say. The useful version of the question is how long last year's request took to answer, who answered it, and whether the answer was a clause or a spreadsheet cell.
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We are mid-way through a lease administration tender.
Then the timing is good. A Register gives the tender a verified baseline to load and a specification to test the shortlist against. It is also the cheapest way to find out how many leases you actually hold.
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Who verifies the extraction, and what happens when it is wrong?
Every field is checked against the clause it cites by a named reviewer, and the principal reads the exceptions and signs the Register. Anything that cannot be verified is marked uncertain and reported as uncertain. Confidence is reported, not performed.
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Can the board or the audit committee commission this without management running it?
Yes. A board-commissioned door exists with identical access rules and the same remit sentence. Which door was used is recorded, not hidden.
Tell us what the estate is about to do.
An audit request. A refinance. A renewal on a site that matters. A tender for a lease system. An acquisition. One scoping call establishes whether a Register fits, and if it does not, we will say so and point you somewhere better suited.
hello@lumenandlever.com · Melbourne · in person or remote, with travel at cost outside Melbourne.